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atucker comments on Building rationalist communities: lessons from the Latter-day Saints - Less Wrong
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I have to wonder if this is really optimal. I've often heard people poke fun at LDS missionaries for exactly this image. Possibly it exudes respectability on a level that people who aren't receptive don't want to acknowledge, but has the church ever experimented with this?
It's hard to compare the relative growth rates of religions because so many do not keep good statistics, and besides which, many databases do not keep statistics for the LDS church separate from those of mainstream Christianity, but the Baha'i faith seems to have had comparable if slightly lesser growth, and far more international success.
Many religions throughout history have achieved explosive growth rates, but none so far as I know have done significant experimentation to optimize their methodology, and a lot of religious conversion tactics rely on what we consider here to be Dark Arts, which are not nearly as conducive to encouraging people to become rationalists.
I'd guess that most widespread religions have pretty good methodology for getting spread, because they were selected for effectively spreading. Like, every major religion started out smaller, and we don't often hear about the ones that didn't make it big.
Is this true?
Like, I know the Dark Arts would be bad for rationalists to exploit, but I'm not sure that it would necessarily be less effective at introducing people to rationality.
The formatting here is confusing. You've lumped together responses to what I said with my own text in the quote.
Edit: Fixed.
Religions are the product of memetic evolution, and thus, are more fit than memes which haven't been subject to selection pressure, but evolutions are stupid, and there's little reason to suspect that any religion is truly optimal for propagation. Plus, optimizing for propagation tends to require playing upon biases that rationalists are encouraged to recognize and avoid.
I think that religious memes are probably more optimal than organisms because successful ones can spread much faster, rely less on pre-existing machinery, can change faster, and because so many of them have been tried.
However, its also possible that we've simply reached a local maxima, and that our current memes are too strong for most upstarts but many upstarts would, with further development, be much more effective.
Overall, I'm inclined to agree with you that rationalist memes would need to be designed.
Rationalist memes probably simply wouldn't be selected for and would have to be designed, because of the fact that you're specifically trying to get someone to weaken the biases that make it easier for religions to stay together.
A 'defense against the Dark Arts' focus might be a good way to implement this. Come join us and find a way to protect yourself from the worst parts of marketing and manipulation.
Edit - please disregard this post